West Indies, and brought back to England again, and has been perfectly good and sweet, as at first.'

Orford is decaying, but Aldborough thrives on its decay. About Dunwich he quotes the lines:

'By numerous examples we may see

That towns and cities die as well as we.'

After some reflections on Carthage, Nineveh and other cities, he proceeds: 'Yet Dunwich, however ruined, retains some share of trade, as particularly for the shipping of butter, cheese, and corn, which is so great a business in this county, that it employs a great many people and ships also; and this port lies right against the particular part of the county for butter, as Framlingham, Halstead (Halesworth), etc.'

He adverts also to corn bought up hereabout for the London market, and coarse cheese, used chiefly for the King's ships.

Sprats are cured here and at 'Swole, or Southole,' the next seaport, in the same way as herrings are cured at Yarmouth. Speaking in their own language, they make red sprats; or, to speak good English, they make sprats red.' The trade is by Walderswick, a little town near Swole,' the ruins of Dunwich having made the shore there unsafe for boats; and he quotes a 'rude verse of their own using, and, I suppose, of their own making, as follows:

666 Swoul, and Dunwich, and Walderswick,

All go in at one lousie creek."'

At this point he gets a smart hit at our late famous atlas-maker,' who called the place a good harbour for ships, and a rendezvous of the royal navy.

At Southwold, on a Sunday, he found in that church, which he estimated as capable of receiving five or six thousand people, only twenty-seven worshippers, besides the parson and the clerk, while the meeting-house of the

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Dissenters was full to the very doors. Once he visited the place in October, and found the leads of the church and the roofs of the houses covered with swallows, weatherbound, the wind being on shore. In the night it shifted to the north-west, and next day not a swallow was left.

A few words suffice for Beccles, Bungay, Halesworth, Saxmundham, Debenham, and Aye, or Eye. The experiment of feeding cattle and sheep on turnips was first made in these parts. People fancied that there would be a flavour in the meat, as in butter from turnipfed cows, but they were entirely mistaken. Turkeys were bred to a very large extent, and driven to London to be killed. A person living at Stratford St. Mary had counted in one season 300 droves of turkeys passing over the Stour, which, at an average of 500 to a drove, amounted to 150,000 in all. Yet this, says Defoe, was one of the least passages, many more travelling by Newmarket, Sudbury, and Clare. Geese from Norfolk and Suffolk were also brought up in droves, but not later than October, when the roads were too stiff for their webbed feet. To get the advantage of the later markets, a goose-cart was invented, four stories high, and for more comfortable travelling driven 'with two horses abreast, like a coach, so quartering the road for the ease of the gentry that thus ride.' So with change of horses they would go sometimes 100 miles in a day and night.

Though in many points of detail Defoe makes slips, yet his shrewd observations, as that 'the pleasure of West Suffolk is much of it supported by the wealth of High Suffolk,' makes this reprint a grand threepenny-worth. His last Suffolk note is on the most exquisite monument' of Chief Justice Holt, at Redgrave.

Though the events of the '15 and the '45 lie far away from our parts, one of the principal actors in the melancholy scene at Culloden was well known for a little while in North Suffolk. William, Duke of Cumberland, visited his secretary, Mr. Windham, at Earsham

Hall, just across the border, hunted over the Suffolk side, gave Windham the Portugal laurels for the walks at the Hall, which were cut up in the severe frost of December 24, 1860, and (if I am not mistaken) is yet named on tavern signs.

T°

CHAPTER XVIII.

LATER DAYS.

O trace the history of agricultural improvement and agricultural depression in Suffolk would be a task only suited for an expert with ample space for unfolding his subject. We will note, firstly, the conversion of many hundred acres of heath-land into arable in the south-east of the county by the application of crag by way of manure. Kirby, treating of the parish of Levington, tells us that though this method had been long known in the west, it was accidentally discovered there by Edmund Edwards, about 1718. Later on, when corn fetched a price, much old pasture was broken up, and to such an extent that the practice had to be generally checked in leases. Things are sadly changed now, and were it not for the delay in forming grass-lands, the reverse process would be taking place all over the country. Hopgrowing, though Bullein, in his Bulwarke of Defence,' speaks of it as at Bruisyard in particular, and says that in many places they brew with hops growing on their own grounds, has declined nearly to vanishing-point. A Kentish traveller passing by Stowmarket may for a few minutes fancy himself in his own county; but with the exception of about ten acres at Rushmere, near Ipswich, which had a reputation for fine hops in the early part of this century, it would be hard to find another instance. Flax was cultivated on a broad slip of soil, about twenty-five miles by

ten, from Eye to Beccles. The exhausting character of the crop has no doubt operated as a cause for its disuse, but there is something more potent in the reign of King Cotton.

Arthur Young, of Bradfield Combust, though as a farmer practically unsuccessful, was able by his writings to bring agriculture under the notice of the more refined classes, and thus deserves a few grateful words. His father was a Prebendary of Canterbury, and Rector of Bradfield Combust. Of all his works, the 'Farmer's Tour through the East of England' (1771) of course concerns us most. But it occupies four volumes, and must be read to be appreciated. About ten years after its appearance, which ominously coincided with his own failure in an Essex farm, he is found farming in Bradfield, and in 1787 he made the first of those French tours by which he is best known. One scene, in which he talked with a poor woman, not twenty-eight, but looking sixty, as he walked uphill, bridle in hand, who told him that she had heard somewhere, in some manner, something is to be done for the poor, is quoted in Carlyle's 'French Revolution,' in the chapter so appropriately entitled 'The General Overturn.' Shortly after his French tours a Board of Agriculture was established, and Mr. Young was its first secretary. He became blind in 1811, died in London in 1820, and lies in Bradfield Church.

In later political history the most prominent Suffolk figures are Charles, Marquis Cornwallis, and Augustus Henry Fitzroy, Duke of Grafton. The former family was settled at Brome very early in the fifteenth century, when the male issue of Robert Buckton, lord of that manor, failed, and the heiress married the son of Thomas Cornwaleys, a London merchant. Our previous chapters have given glimpses of this household at Brome. In addition may be named Sir Frederick, first Baronet of the name in 1627, and created Baron Cornwallis of Eye in 1661, who rescued Lord Wilmot at Cropredy Bridge; and his son Charles, who, though a Tory, adhered to the Revo